![]() There is reason to believe that the fluency text speak requires of people is helping to make them adaptable in a world that is dominated by fast-paced, tech-heavy startups a world that requires adaptability in order to survive and thrive. As such, it is no better or worse than the introduction of email before it or the telegram before that. Each year, new words are added to the dictionary to represent the changing nature of language-150 last year alone, including three explicitly linked to texting culture: srsly (text speak for “seriously”), emoji (the emoticons and smileys used often in text messages), and TL:DR (short for “Too long, didn’t read.”) Just as writing became a new way of expressing language all those thousands of years ago, texting is a new form of expression entirely representative of the way we communicate today-that is, quickly, economically, and on the go. ![]() Writing, at an estimated 5,000 years old, is itself is a mere babe compared to language, which traces back at least 80,000 years. Language has a rich history of evolution. If we look at what the age of digital information-and texting and other forms of digital shorthand in particular-has done to the art of interpersonal communication, all is not lost. And yet the reports of the death of eloquent expression may be greatly exaggerated. Today, that practice time is used up screen-to-screen, rather than face-to-face or through composing a well-constructed letter. If conversation is an art, art takes practice. ![]() “The language you use for texting and the language you use for homework.” And although a 2013 study published in the journal Linguistics and Translation concluded that most users are “context conscious,” and are adept at switching from text speak to writing that calls for more formality, is it any wonder the two sometimes intersect? “Sometimes it’s like there are two languages in your head,” the teenaged daughter of a close friend recently told me. In a 2012 study published in the journal New Media & Society, researchers at Wake Forest University found a correlation between the use of SMS-abbreviations and the increasing inability among students to identify and use correct grammar the more texts the 10-to-14-year-olds in the study sent, the worse their grammar performance. There is wide concern that eloquence has fallen victim to expediency, that the thoughtful phrase has been replaced by the fascicle contraction, that communication is suffering, and that texting bears the brunt of the blame.
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